I have two questions concerning FEMEN. Avant Garde Shock provocateurs of the day FEMEN, a purported “feminist activist group leave several questions in my mind, beyond the efficacy of their stunts in raising consciousness about the particular topics they protest, their group’s whole agenda shows a decided slant in their socially militant and provocative agendas.
My questions are:
1. Are they sincere or insincere ideologues, who also happen to be idiots or exhibitionists
2. Are they sincerely convinced of the efficacy of their tactics, or they in fact, or at least their core leadership, quite conscious of the problematics of their tactics because, in fact, their agenda is ironic, in the classical sense, in that they mean something other than what they speak and present in public?
3. Are they sincerely convinced of the importance of the topics and targets they chose for their provocations, or are both simply of a diversionary nature?
4. Why are all of the activists seen to date young, physically attractive and nubile, and highly photogenic, and racially mostly Eurasian (though a couple of darker faces joined them for one or two of their French protests one notes, even in the protests on Tunisian interests, it was the same blonde and redheaded gals, at least in the few pictures I saw)
Being Ukrainian they know far better than most of the horrific abuses women in the Ukraine sometimes suffer and most particular the scourge of human trafficking. A polite modern euphemism for slave trading, and in most cases Sex Slavery. This being nothing new to that region the Slavs were once known as Saqaliba throughout the Mediterranean in both Graeco-Roman Byzantine territories and Arab-Persianate Islamic territories. The word designated slaves.
Like many of my black ancestors, these girls in FEMEN come from a slave race, on the world scale. Before the emergence of Muscovy for the most part even regional States, like the Varigian Rus, and the Khazars, as well as the Bulgars massively exported women from the Ukraine as sex slaves. To the scale, over history, of millions. Norse traders from Iceland or Denmark or even the Franks from Frankland would regularly purchase these girls. Their Maternal DNA lineages flow in people living to this day from Ireland, Scotland, England, Denmark, Iceland, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Syria, Egypt, Arabia…
But the sex slavery of that day, with its harem intrigues, may have been more kind than today. The stated media discourse on human trafficking under-estimates much. In my own county, in a little Midwestern state, there are thousands of Eastern European women, many from Ukraine, literally kept in dog cages and rented out for the night or sometimes sold wholesale.
What does this have to do with FEMEN? I’m coming to that.]
Numerous Sex Positive Sex worker activists on the blogosphere and elsewhere minimize the real degree of coerced Sexual labor, basically Sex Slavery, in modern day prostitution. I think some are sincere, they are typically well educated, went into sex work to pay their way through college or such like, and have a rather bourgeois view of such things and conflate the somewhat safer commercial sexual adventures that make up their life with Sex Work as a whole. Naturally working in an industry that’s somewhat taboo still they would want to put the best face forward and express intense skepticism regarding the very real issues of Sex Trafficking. It is a totally understandable, but counterproductive, reaction on their part.
I was recently conversing with a close friend whose spouse works in my county’s Justice System. In conversing this friend privately spoke of things heard from this person’s spouse regarding internal investigations into eastern European Sex slavery, arrests, raids, girls kept filthy and beaten in large dog cages, all sorts of lurid things. It is a significant aspect of prostitution even here in the heartland of quiet America. But then again I’ve heard of this from others, of Taxi drivers who delivered people to abandoned downtown Warehouses in the ghetto full of foreign girls working underground parties, and other interesting things. From people I’ve spoken to the problem is far higher than even activists are aware of, and much goes unreported in the news.
Now leave the Midwest and consider the coasts, such trafficking exists on a significant scale in large cities like New York, Washington DC, or on the West coast in LA, or other places. But it is also significant throughout the heartland of America.
Europe is worse, for obvious reasons, and Israel is one of the largest hubs for Russian or Ukrainian sex slaves. Dubai also has such a scene. cities like Berlin or Amsterdam or Tel Aviv from accounts not only from activists but also journalists and police government officials struggling with the problem, likely make any American city’s human trafficking issues pale in comparison. But the fact is that far more women today are actively traded in underground networks as slaves, avoiding cute modern euphemisms, than ever before in history.
This all relates to FEMEN quite directly. I will discuss exactly how shortly.